Instead of Tickets, Some Nets Fans Swipe a Card

Season-Ticket Holders Will Receive a Black Team-Branded Card for Entry

By

Frederick Dreier

Oct. 11, 2013 7:26 p.m. ET

The ticket stub has become a relic in the modern sports industry, as teams and leagues have switched to electronic vouchers, mobile phone bar codes or other paperless tickets.

The Nets have become the latest to snub the stub.

Fans who bought full or partial season-ticket plans this season will receive a black team-branded credit card in the mail, instead of the traditional roll of paper tickets. When swiped at a turnstile, the card grants access to the Barclays Center.

ENLARGE

The Barclays Center last year
Associated Press

Fred Mangione, the team's chief officer of marketing and revenue, said the card eliminates the problems of paper tickets. Fans regularly leave their tickets at home, bring the wrong tickets to the game or purchase counterfeit tickets online, he said.

The Nets aren't alone—20 other NBA teams already use some type of paperless ticketing system. In 2012, all 30 Major League Baseball adopted the leaguewide MLB FanPass system, which gave fans the option to purchase paperless tickets. The Red Bulls went to a card system back in 2009.

But the industry's race to adopt paperless systems has fueled a heated debate between teams and third-party ticket resellers such as StubHub.com, which is owned by eBay Inc. Paperless ticketing systems were designed in part to keep high-end seats off the resale market by creating electronic barriers that only allow the original purchaser to use the seat. Tickets sold on the secondary market often go for less than the original ticket price.

Other systems only allow fans to sell through websites owned by leagues or large ticket bodies, such as Veritix, the NBA Ticket Exchange or the MLB-owned Tickets.com.

The majority of teams allow the sale of their seats through third-party websites. StubHub.com is the official reseller of MLB tickets, for example. According to Alison Salcedo of StubHub, only the Cleveland Cavaliers, Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets, Houston Rocket, Utah Jazz, and Detroit Lions still use ticket systems that restrict third-party sellers.

"Traditional paperless ticketing presents a real challenge for our business," she said. "Any team or promoter who tires to limit a fan's options to resell their tickets, we disagree with that."

Lawmakers have stepped into the debate. In April, California legislators struck down a ban on paperless tickets, which was seen as a blow to StubHub.com and a boon to Ticketmaster, owned by concert promoter Live Nation Entertainment.

New York is the only state with legislation preventing restrictive paperless tickets, which was signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2011. New Jersey lawmakers are deliberating a similar bill, which would prohibit restrictive paperless tickets.

Mangione said the Nets' paperless tickets adhere to New York state rules, and that fans who bought season tickets can transfer their tickets via email or sell them through third-party websites such as StubHub.com or Craigslist.com.

But he said the team would try to persuade its customers to sell their tickets via the team's NBA Ticket Exchange website instead of through third-party sellers. "People come up every night with bogus tickets they bought on StubHub," he said. "We're trying to protect our customer."

The Nets are also trying to learn about their fans' spending habits with the credit card system. The system encourages fans to buy everything from hamburgers to hats inside the arena with the card, which fans can add value to via a personalized Web page.

A loyalty program rewards the top spenders with access to Nets practices, a chance to walk onto the court with the team before a game and even seats in the team's luxury boxes.

Chris Lencheski, president of Front Row Marketing, a sports consulting group, said teams with credit-card paperless tickets collect data from these transactions. The data can help them streamline their infrastructure, such as how to cut down on concession-stand lines. But it also creates a trove of data that can be sold to marketers.

After monitoring fan habits via a credit-card system, the Red Bulls created specific card-only concession stands on the concourses for fans. Tim Sinclair, the team's manager of fan services, said the cards showed team executives who was showing up for the games, because tickets that were resold or transferred via email required both parties to include personal information.

"We could see whether the tickets were for friends and family, or for business," Sinclair said. "It gave us a 360-degree view of our customer."

Mangione said the Nets wouldn't sell fan data to marketing partners or track their purchases on the branded credit cards within the arena. The team's data collections would instead focus on obtaining information from customers who purchase the card tickets over the NBA Ticket Exchange site.

"Under the old system, if 1,200 people bought on StubHub, those were 1,200 names I missed out on," he said. "Now these people go into our database and we can market directly to them."

Anything that kills the secondary market is good. Especially since those leeches - stubhub and ticketmaster - tack on fee after fee and scalpers use digital bots to scoop up as many tickets online as possible and sell them at ridiculously inflated prices.

This is probably going to be an unpopular stance, but I'm with the teams who are using paperless ticket entry. Paper tickets are a hassle to manage, both for fans and for teams.

StubHub is not entitled to third-party sales. I don't care if their business model is threatened. Fans surely must know when they buy a ticket plan with a paperless ticket team that they won't be able to resell their seats.

Victor, I've found eBay to be the best place to sell some of my tickets, primarily because there's no intermediary like StubHub with its excessive fees, etc. How am I going to sell paperless tickets for games I can't attend?

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